Aleksyei Maksimovich Pyeshkov was born on March 14th, 1869, at Nijni-Novgorod. His mother Barbara was the daughter of a house painter and decorator, Vasily Kacherin; his father was Maksim Savvatiev Pyeshkov, an upholsterer of Perm. Aleksyei's parents seem to have been worthy, colourless people, and fairly well educated for their station; but they dwindle into insignificance before their respective fathers. Young Pyeshkov's two grandfathers were undeniably men of character, self-made men of brutal energy, who terrorized their respective families, and were as hard and cold as the money they worshipped. So severe, indeed, was the regimen of Aleksyei's paternal grandfather, that his own son ran away from him five times in the course of seven years. On the fifth occasion he did not return, but walked all the way (he was only seventeen) from Tobolsk in Siberia, where the family then lived, to Nijni-Novgorod, where he settled down as an apprentice to a clothier. Five years later we find him occupying a responsible position in the office of a steamship company at Astrakhan. Gorky's maternal grandfather may well have been the prototype of Ignat Gordyeev, the most impressive character in Gorky's romance, "Thoma Gordyeev." Beginning life as a raftsman on the Volga, in the course of a short time he became a man of substance, started a dyeing factory at his native place, Nijni-Novgorod, was elected _Starshina,_ or Chief of the Traders' Guild there, and was generally looked up to by everyone but his wretched daughter, whom he made more wretched still when she threw herself away--or so he accounted it--on such a poor non-descript as Maksim Pyeshkov. The earlier years of Aleksyei Pyeshkov were as uneventful as are the years of most children. In 1873, however, when he was only four years old, he met with his first misfortune: his rolling stone of a father died of cholera at Astrakhan. His mother re-married shortly afterwards, and transferred him to the care of his grandfather, who seems to have been kind to the little lad--cruel fathers are very often indulgent grandfathers--and taught him to read with the aid of the Psalter and other liturgical books, by way of preparing him for school, whither he was presently sent But his regular schooling lasted no longer than five months, for about this time his mother died of consumption, and almost simultaneously his last natural prop gave way, his grandfather suddenly ruining himself utterly by over-speculation. Little Aleksyei, therefore, was obliged to exchange his schoolroom for the shop of a cobbler to whom he was apprenticed; but after serving his master for two months, he burnt one hand so severely with boiling pitch that he was pronounced useless to the trade, and sent about his business.